Who Cares if Apple Ditches the Headphone Jack? Wireless Is the Future

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Who Cares if Apple Ditches the Headphone Jack? Wireless Is the Future

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

By now you've probably heard the rumor. You know, the one about the iPhone 7 not having a headphone jack? "Rumor" isn't even the right word, really; this is about the time every year that Apple and its partners start selectively leaking information to prepare users for what's coming. In this case, it looks like Cupertino is hoping to get all the negative news cycles out of the way early, so that by the time the jackless iPhone comes out it'll be a footnote in a news story rather than cause for impassioned diatribes about user hostility.

Whether Apple actually swings the ax this fall (which it probably will) or waits another generation, the headphone jack is definitely on its way out. Motorola's next flagship phone, the Moto Z, doesn't have a headphone jack. LeEco, a Chinese company, recently launched three phones with zero headphone jacks between them. Even audio companies are getting on board: Headphone makers like Audeze and Philips, along with a long list of smaller companies, are already making cans and buds that plug into USB and Lightning ports instead of that tiny round hole. The moment Apple makes the switch could be the tipping point, though. Where Apple goes, the industry follows.

On its face, there's not much to like about the death of the headphone jack, even if it will make your phone a smidge thinner, your battery a smidge bigger, and possibly boost sound quality. But there's a silver lining: by yanking the headphone jack out of the iPhone 7, Apple could start a revolution in wireless headphones. Instead of buying a new cord, we might just cut it.

Go back to 2011 for a second. You're holding your brand new iPhone 4S. It's so pretty! You need a way to play music, so you buy a speaker dock—maybe an iHome, or a Bose SpeakerDock. Pop your phone in and music starts playing. But then, a year later, when Apple released the iPhone 5 and dropped the 30-pin connector for Lightning, you were shopping again. "We thought there would be this big market of Lightning dock speakers," NPD analyst Ben Arnold says. But that didn't happen. "The big business of docks that we had at the time," says Rory Dooley, audio wearables GM1 at Logitech, "that business more or less disappeared." Instead, wireless took over.

Lightning headphones are a bad idea. But wireless headphones are a great one.

Over the last few years, the market for Bluetooth headphones and speakers has exploded. One study found that Bluetooth speakers rose 68 percent year-over-year in 2015, and will continue rising at 36 percent per year for the next three. Last summer, research firm NPD found that while headphone sales grew 18 percent in the previous year, sales of Bluetooth models more than doubled, which Arnold says is an important sign. "The market is kind of naturally going toward more Bluetooth anyway right now," he says. "The products are much improved, and consumers are more aware of Bluetooth and wireless." There was a stigma against wireless headphones for a long time, with audiophiles turning up their noses at the "inferior sound quality" of Bluetooth. But the wireless tech has caught up. Dooley tells me that for almost everyone in almost every situation, there's no difference between wired and wireless anymore. Oh, and it turns out most people don't care that much about sound quality anyway.

Unlike with Lightning or USB models, the case for wireless headphones is incredibly easy to make. They're wireless! They don't tangle, they don't rip out of your ears because they're stuck on the lady's bag next to you, they don't wear and fray and need replacement. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi work across device types and platforms, and are likely to be supported long after Apple inevitably dumps Lightning too.

Wireless headphones also make sense given the way we listen to music in 2016. A few years ago, your music was a bunch of MP3 files on your iPod. A few years before that it was CDs and cassettes. Now, anywhere there's Spotify there's music—and Spotify is everywhere. Even the idea of connecting to your phone for music will be outdated soon. "People don’t actually want to take their phone" with them on a run, Dooley says. "They do it because they have to—they want to track their speed, their distance, all those things." Soon enough you'll do all that through your smartwatch, or your Pebble Core, or through your headphones themselves!

This transition, of course, has not happened yet. And there will be plenty of painful consequences to a sudden shift to all-Bluetooth-everything. Right now, many Bluetooth headphones, particularly cheaper ones, and especially the truly wireless earbuds, have problems keeping a solid connection. Switching a pair of Bluetooth headphones from one device to another can be more complicated than hacking into a nuclear reactor. All those headphones run on batteries, and batteries die. Your car probably doesn't have a Bluetooth connection. Your home stereo almost certainly doesn't. And the in-flight entertainment system in the back of seat 12C definitely doesn't. That's why some wireless headphones already come with a backup cable, and it's why nobody can get by on Jaybird Freedoms alone. For a little while at least, we're probably going to be stuck with Lightning headphones. Which will suck.

In the long run, though, it almost won't matter whether Apple kills the headphone jack. (Personally, I hope it never goes away, but that seems unlikely.) Airlines are already ditching the screens, using apps and Wi-Fi to give you movies on whatever device you have. All you need now, Dooley says, "is access to the cloud, and then a rendering device." That's, um, everything. As wireless streaming tech continues to improve, as voice interfaces get more powerful, and as the "hearable" market takes off and starts to put all the features you want straight into your buds, you'll simply run out of reasons to plug your headphones in. Until the battery dies, anyway. Then it's dongle time.

1 UPDATE: An earlier version of this story misstated Rory Dooley's title at Logitech.